In my opinion - no expert, mind - the problem with Thatcher's sell-off of publicly-owned homes wasn't that it put people into debt, but that it was accompanied by putting a stop to building any council homes.
The same was done in Ireland, and most of the people I knew who bought their council houses at very cheap rates immediately sold them for double (literally) what they'd paid. They then put the money towards buying another house.
The result was that house prices soared, and those on low wages no longer had the option of renting from the council, because the council houses were gone, and weren't being replaced. Then we started seeing people sleeping on the streets, something I never saw from my 1950s childhood until the late 1980s.
An extraordinary hostility has since grown up between those who have a little and those who had nothing - a modern version of what the Victorians called "tuppence-ha'penny looking down on tuppence" - and people talk about "dole scroungers" having "free houses" from the council, unaware that those few and prized council houses that still exist are as expensive to rent as private dwellings.
In England, John Lanchester has a good piece on this attitude change.